by Linda Nagata
His arms had been half lifted in tentative greeting. Now he let them fall back to his sides, where they danced and jerked like marionettes. He chuckled grimly. “Kirstin. What a pleasant surprise. Did you miss me so much? How touching.”
Her smile faded. She stepped into the room. “Give me the Bohr Maker,” she said. “I know you have it.”
Nikko held himself very still. She must have found Van Ness. But if she’d found him, why hadn’t she recovered the Maker? “You’re wrong,” he said cautiously. “I don’t have it.”
“Huh. You don’t expect me to believe your little brother convinced Van Ness to run.”
“Sandor?” Nikko stepped forward anxiously. “What about Sandor? What do you know about him?”
“He’s dead. And if I have anything to say about it, he’ll stay that way.”
“No! You can’t block his resurrection. He’s innocent.”
“So prove it. Give me the Maker.”
“I don’t have the Maker! If I had it, do you think I’d be standing here, wasting my time on a twisted old fuck like you?”
Her chin dipped. Her eyes glittered dangerously. “Give me the goddamn Maker, Nikko, or your brother is going to be thoroughly, utterly dead. The goddamn Maker and a full confession, you fucking whore. You fucking child murderer. How old was your brother? Eighteen? You killed him. Good as sticking a knife in his throat. He’s dead because of you. Have you fixed yourself up yet with Bohr’s Maker? Are you happy to be alive?”
“I don’t have it!” he screamed. “If I had it I wouldn’t be shaking myself to pieces!” He turned away, his fingers clawing convulsively at the memory of the soft, vulnerable feel of her neck. The recollection intrigued him. He’d never really touched her before. But now, for the first time, she was real and he was real and Sandor would be better off in the hands of almost anyone but her.
But no. It would do no good. Kirstin was a creature of many incarnations. She’d just pop up again in another city, and swoop down on Sandor and Fox and Summer House like a harpy from hell.
He raised his hands in a gesture of surrender. But Kirstin must have misconstrued his intent. She hissed and darted toward him, a stun gun in her hand. He tried to dodge, but she was faster. Somehow she’d managed to time her move perfectly, despite the unfamiliar gravity. She tapped him in the back. A charge raced up his spine. His rib cage spasmed, driving the breath out of his lungs, and he sprawled hard on the floor, bruising his chin and chest.
In an instant she was on her knees beside him. “Confession time, Nikko. Where’s the fucking Maker?”
“I don’t have it,” he growled again, forcing the words from his tingling throat. His arms and legs were quivering, out of control. The kisheer had shriveled into a painful knot. “Van Ness synthesized the bloody thing. He brought out a physical copy. I couldn’t send that through the data Gates. So I don’t have it. I never had it. Never!”
“And Sandor?”
He could feel the barbs of the stun against the back of his neck. If she fired it now, it could cripple his atrium. He sucked in breath after breath, feeling like a lobster, set to boil in its shell. “Van Ness knew me under Sandor’s face, that’s all. It was a convenience. Not everybody likes to fuck blue, you know. And besides, Van Ness liked boys.”
She struck him across the back of the head with the stun gun’s housing. “You dirty whore,” she hissed.
He grunted at the blow. His teeth squeezed together, as if he could press out the pain. “Sandor’s innocent,” he croaked. “Didn’t know anything. Didn’t even know I was using his face.”
“That could have been awkward for him,” Kirstin said acidly, “if he’d chanced to meet one of your clients.” Then, in a wheedling voice he’d come to despise, “Why should I believe you?”
Panic spread its wings in his belly. She had to accept his confession. “Why should I lie?”
Kirstin chuckled. “It does seem a bit out of character for you to play the hero. But technically, the possibility that you might be trying to save your brother’s ass constitutes a mo—” She screamed.
The lights went out. Nikko felt a crushing weight fall across him, engulf him. He couldn’t breathe. He couldn’t see. He felt himself being lifted up; ferried away. Kirstin thrashed against him. They rolled together in a thick, liquid world as fiery lancets of pain began to pierce his body, a billion tiny knives carving his flesh into a billion tiny flakes, pieces of himself cut loose and abandoned, falling away into darkness. His structure was dissolving. Flesh was stripped away from bones. Bones eroded and disappeared. Thoughts shot round and round in his brain in terrified loops. He was being consumed alive by microscopic piranhas. Torn apart by a billion hungry sharks, one bite at a time. And he could do nothing to stop it.
Chapter
11
Kirstin sat in stony silence, staring at Nikko’s corpse. It was sprawled in a dense patch of grasses on the edge of a meadow, the long blue limbs bent at awkward angles. His body had the slick, wet look of a newborn baby. But he was dead.
She huddled a few meters away, crouched against the warm surface of a rock that protruded from the brown meadow grass, the two-thirds G of Summer House pulling like an oppressive weight against her shoulders. Her skin and hair and clothes were still slick with the organic gel that filled the transit system of Summer House. The House was a fully organic habitat—an entity, some would say. And it had turned on Nikko. It had killed him.
She shivered despite the heat, remembering the sight of the apartment walls coming down around them, as if reality had suddenly melted, pouring in upon them like hot jelly. . . .
To escape the image, she forced herself to stand up, to pace the surface of the meadow. This incarnation was heavier, bulkier than her primary on Castle, well muscled to withstand House gravity, but less graceful than her accustomed form.
She flexed her arms and looked about. Except for Nikko’s corpse, she was quite alone. Birds sang in the surrounding forest, undaunted by the oppressive heat. A slight wind flowed in from a break in the broad-leafed trees. With a shrug, she followed the breeze to the edge of the meadow—also, she discovered, the edge of a cliff.
Standing quietly a few steps back from the precipice, she gazed at the wall of another cliff, some two hundred meters away across a gulf of open air. It was studded with windows, and it rose far higher than the one on which she stood. Her gaze followed it up, until she was forced to crane her neck, squinting against the glare. Even then the summit eluded her behind a slowly roiling bank of fog.
She looked down. The windowed cliff descended at least a kilometer below her, rooted in darkness.
Kirstin grunted, impressed despite herself. So this was the hollow interior of Summer House. She’d never experienced it directly, though she’d studied it for many decades.
The House was a mockery of Gaia. The oceans were on the outside: walls composed of huge, discrete cells of water that were maintained as a habitat for a multitude of aquatic organisms while doubling as a massive radiation shield. Inside this was the city proper, a fairly conventional ring of apartments and parks, shops and offices, and factories. The windowed cliff that faced her across the gulf was the inner wall of the city.
But it was the hollow interior cylinder that made Summer House famous.
This massive space—over four kilometers high and two across—housed a vertical forest hung on a supporting structure of freely branching, curvilinear beams fifteen meters in diameter. This was the heartwood, the bones of Summer House, a massive, treelike structure upon which all the rest of the House had been hung: the encapsulated oceans, the apartment complexes, the forest. The heartwood spanned the height of the forest, from bed to apex, and provided the rooting foundation for most of its trees. Its branches bridged the gap of open sky around the forest and fused with the surrounding walls. Inside the heartwood, a transit system piped nutrients, water, life-forms, heat, and light as Summer House actively maintained an equilibrium between its varied components. Myriad
tiny, nonsentient brains regulated the system. Kirstin wondered if any one of them in particular had ordered Nikko’s murder.
Her forced journey through the transit system had been blind, hot, and terrifying. There’d been no transit bubble to protect her from the heated fluids pumped through the circulatory system of this mindless behemoth. She and Nikko had been wrapped in a thin sac, like a chorionic membrane, two twins pressed together in the womb. His frantic struggles had bruised her. But his sudden stillness was worse. She’d panicked, certain that her turn was next. But no. The House had freed her, dumping her through a portal and into this meadow. Why?
A condor appeared in the gulf of open air, climbing up from below in a lazy spiral, its great wings hardly moving as it mounted higher and higher, rising on a convection current until it encountered a patch of sky: a horizontal platform the size of a small lake, mounted on a branch of heartwood. The sky emitted blue light from below, while supporting a treeless bog on its upper surface. Tendrils of fog appeared above the dense grasses, only to be whisked away by the wind.
The condor veered away from the obstruction, wheeling around the curve of the vertical canopy. The sight stirred memories in her, of times a hundred years past. She breathed in the scent of the forest, remembering the dangerous days with Leander, the Colombian rainforest, the guns that had flowed through her hands like water.
They’d fought for the Goddess then. And they’d won, in a way. The ravaged body of Mother Earth would need millennia to repair, but the Commonwealth tended what it could. Not out of devotion of course. But for purely economic reasons. Molecular prospectors were still extracting fortunes from the forest resource. Fox had been one of them. He’d made his fortune in Ecuador. Then, with exemplary human illogic, he’d abandoned the Mother to construct this rubber-doll mockery of the body of Gaia.
She spat contemptuously into the grass.
Summer House was not real. None of the life forms here were natural. Every one of them had been genetically tailored to suit this artificial ecosystem. So the House could not even claim status as a museum. It was a fatuous experiment, and no more.
“Chief Adair!” The shout resounded across the meadow. She turned, to see three uniformed police officers emerge from the gray door of an arched portal set in a rough earthen bank—the same portal that had earlier spit forth herself and what was left of Nikko. “We got your distress call,” the lead officer shouted. “But we had a bitch of a time finding you. The House didn’t want to admit you were—
“My God,” he said, as he almost stumbled over Nikko’s body. “What happened to . . . ?” His question trailed off and he looked up guiltily. Kirstin knew he was weighing the possibility that his boss had performed an unwarranted execution.
She crossed the meadow. By the time she reached the huddled officers, the portal was active again. The silhouette of a human figure appeared in it. At first half-sized, it grew rapidly larger. A moment later a red-haired, florid-faced old man stumbled from the arch. She grinned as she recognized him: Fox Jiang-Tibayan.
She stepped aside, so that he might have a clear view of Nikko’s corpse.
The sight transfixed Fox. He uttered a little cry of anguish, then fell to his knees beside the body, his hands running in a practiced medical routine across Nikko’s neck, head, and chest. Kirstin squatted across from him. “He’s dead,” she said, more to inflict another wound than to impart any information. “Your House killed him. Did you design it to behave that way?”
He spared her a solitary glance, then bowed his head against Nikko’s motionless chest.
At the portal, yet another figure was emerging, and then another and another until there were six. All with the appearance of twenty-somethings, they huddled around Fox, talking in low whispers. Kirstin tossed back her gel-slicked hair and strode into their midst. They gave way before her, seeming almost as frightened of her as they were of Nikko’s remains. She nudged at the still blue-china body with the toe of her shoe. “So who do I arrest for murder, Fox?” she asked. “You? Or the House? Who do I get to charge with the kidnapping and assault of a Commonwealth police officer?”
“It was an accident,” Fox said, in a weak voice that was barely audible over the sound of the wind in the trees.
The twenty-somethings murmured angrily. “Leave him alone,” one young man warned. “His son is dead.”
Kirstin studied the body dubiously. Nikko certainly seemed dead. But in the modern world it was hard to be sure. She pinned the twenty-something with her gaze. “Why?” she asked. “Why is he dead?”
The young man seemed struck dumb. No matter. Fox answered for him. “He never had a mind for molecular detail. He would use my tools without understanding them. He would use them for things I had never intended.” Fox finally looked up. His face was haggard. There were actual tears in his eyes. He looked every part the grieving father. But some inner sense told Kirstin she was watching a performance.
“Were you developing illegal tech, old man?”
“No!” He fired off the word like a bullet. “Your people watch me closely enough. You know that.”
“Then what happened to him?”
“He was using tech illegally. He wanted to live. He wanted to escape from you. He expected to be arrested, you know. So he programmed the House to rescue him and record his pattern if it looked like his freedom was in danger. He thought he could hide his pattern in the House neural plexus.”
Kirstin stiffened. She felt her lips pull back from her teeth. “Can he?”
Fox’s eyes narrowed. His bitterness oozed through. “That would be illegal, now wouldn’t it?”
“Can he, old man?” Kirstin pressed.
Fox’s brief defiance faded. He seemed to sink in upon himself, and once again he was the weak, grieving, aged father. “The House was constructed under the guidance of the Commonwealth Committee on Technology. The plexus executes a search for unregistered programs every thirty seconds and evicts any that it finds.”
“Nikko must have known that,” she insisted.
Fox shrugged. “Nikko believed he could find a way around every rule—and generally, he could. But this time he didn’t have a chance to work out the details.”
“So it was Nikko who ordered the House to commit his own murder.”
“He didn’t want to be interrogated; he might have given himself away.”
Kirstin stood cock-hipped, coolly evaluating the old man. She knew a piece of fiction when she heard it. Nikko wasn’t dead. He was somewhere in the body of the House; he had to be. Because a devoted father like Fox could always be counted on to shelter a wayward child.
Nikko’s ghost stood hunched in anger in front of the desk of Marevic Chun, regional president of Summer House-at-Earth. “I almost had it, Marevic,” he hissed. “Bohr’s Maker. Here in my hand. But Van Ness let it slip away. And now Sandor’s gone.”
Marevic nodded grimly. She sat at her desk, a slightly built, dark-haired, fragile-faced woman who somehow looked her age, despite the youthful smoothness of her brown skin. Perhaps it was the eyes: cold and reptilian. Perhaps it was the antique bent of her mannerisms.
Or perhaps it was the coloring of his own prejudice. He loved Marevic Chun . . . the same way a schoolboy might have loved his first-grade teacher—most respectfully. She’d taught him how to play tag with the police and she’d never been caught.
They shared a deeper affinity too, though neither admitted it aloud. When Fox had developed Nikko in his lab, he’d started with genetic material from himself and a female donor. Nikko had been eleven when he’d broken into that research file. He’d been inspired by Sandor’s birth to see how much they had genetically in common. He recalled the pleasure and astonishment he’d felt at learning that Marevic figured in his parentage. Sandor had been conceived from different donor stock. Why? Nikko suspected that Fox had not been entirely happy with his first child, and that he’d seen no reason to repeat his original mistake.
Marevic had never shown the same p
rejudice. She’d always treated him in a straightforward way. “We received a distress packet from Sandor nearly half an hour ago,” she told him. “He was in Sunda at the time. We haven’t been able to trace him.”
Nikko felt his mouth fall open. “So the police don’t have him?” That was very bad. If Sandor were in the hands of the Commonwealth Police, it was reasonable to expect he would survive at least the few hours it would take to prepare a trial. But if he were simply missing. . . .
Marevic looked down at her desk, while her small fingers lightly stroked its marbled surface. “The municipal police may have him.”
“Love and Nature.”
If she replied to his oath, he missed it. He was already consulting the net, seeking out a mule to ride through the hell of urban Sunda. He would find Sandor. He had to find Sandor.
“Nikko!”
His gaze roved outward, briefly.
“Don’t go,” she said. “I want you to stay with me. It’s only a matter of time before Kirstin runs over your trail. She’ll have the Gate filters set for you. You have to take care. You could be the last surviving copy of yourself.”
“Huh. If she’s hunting copies of me, she’s not going to overlook your head.”
Anger flashed across Marevic’s delicate face. “This is serious, Nikko. Big time.”
He nodded. “Call me if you hear anything.” Then he sent his ghost to Earth.
A few hours later, Kirstin’s consciousness rejoined the body she’d left at Castle mausoleum. It felt good to be home and in a clean body. While she dressed, she checked in with Allende, voice only.
He told her: “The dogs followed the Maker’s trail to a city herbalist. Zeke Choy, an ex-cop out of Haskin’s.”
Kirstin ran the name through her atrium notebook, but came up with nothing. “Never heard of him,” she said, as she pulled on the black tunic of her police uniform.
“He was a draftee. Had a bad attitude; didn’t last long.”